War Poetry

War Poetry

The poem ‘Rear Guard’ is about a man who is going through a tunnel and

is looking for headquarters. He sees a man lying on the floor as if he

was asleep but finds that he is dead. In the end he makes it out of

the tunnel.

The poem ‘Strange Meeting’ is about a man who ran into a tunnel after

escaping from something. In this poem the man also sees man lying on

the floor as if they were asleep, but this time one of the men jumps

up – he was a ghost – the man in this poem thinks that he is in hell.

During his ‘Strange Meeting’ the ghost explains how terrible it is to

die young. In the end of the poem the ghost tells the man that it was

him who killed him, and they should be friends and rest peacefully.

I think that both of these poems are quite similar. For example; both

of the poems the men meet dead people who they called ‘ sleepers’.

This means that both of the men are dead and are lying there on the

floor as if they are asleep.

Another similarity in both the poems is that they are set in a tunnel.

The tunnel is used as a metaphor for hell: “uploading hell behind

him…” the tunnel is compared to hell because it means dying and being

dead as that is what both the men found inside the tunnel. By

comparing the tunnel to dying and hell the writer makes us realise

that these men are close to dying and that they are fading away slowly

as they go deeper into the tunnel.

In both of the poems the men are showing what they have learnt about

the war and what war has done to them and others in the poem ‘ The

Rear Guard’ when the dead man doesn’t answer he kicks him and says “

God blast your neck!!” This shows that these men have been dehumanised

by the war, they have become aggressive against everyone because of